Before the times of momentous change, when the resources of rationality are in crisis and categories considered common sense are being deconstructed, the transformative energy of the people’s fury and despair bring into play charismatic characters who operate with the dark forces of irrationality. At the dusk of empires renegades, adventurers, conspirators, and quasi-religious leaders seek to instrumentalise imperial symbolism while perverting its very essence. Tyrants, in fear of these people’s attempts at the status quo, respond by repressing them. Such are the cases of Pussy Riot’s prayer and a Yakutian shaman’s march on the Kremlin to cast Putin out of it: Pussy Riot being sentenced to a two-year jail term and the shaman forcefully placed in a psychiatric ward long before making it to the Kremlin. The protagonist of the film arrives to the presidential suite in a hotel near the Kremlin to perform a ritual. There he weds a pike who, being a character of Russian folk tales, discloses the secret knowledge of aquatic cum agrarian symbolism of the Soviet coat of arms leading him to reconstruct it with the ears of wheat, crawfish shells, and an amorphous blub in place of the globe. To complete the puzzle of the ritual the shaman invites the woman from the Hentai-like porn seen on the hotel’s television to invoke a perfect weapon and aim it straight on target. Nikita Vasilenko

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